Throughout this semester we learn methods to communicate effeciently not only in small groups, but at a interpersonal level. The most important thing i noted in being an effective communicator is to show empathy and support to those addressing you, as it demonstrate respect and it could establish a cordial relationship in the future, perhaps a great new friend.
Upon getting into our teams, we collectively employed many aspects of small communication learn this semester to work in synergy and reach our common goal of an efficient and eloquent presentation of our topic. We try establishing a positive group development by setting effective group norms, a set of leadership, agreeing in our common goal, our degree of interest and participation in the group, and finally a group evaluation.
The topic we selected by a rule of majority to be our presentation was the use and effects of illegal substance in modern society. Our group is integrated by Bryan presenting alcohol abuse, Latrivia with cannabis, Jazmin with a pure version of MDMA, Erika with opiates, Tiffany with prescription pain killers, Claudia as our moderator, and Pedro explain cocaine abuse. Our group development was rather slow, I consider myself shy and withdrawn, and unfortunately the vast majority of our members are introverted as well. I will use Tuckman's theory of group development to illustrate the dynamics of our interpersonal interactions within the group. Tuckman's stages include forming, storming, norming, performing and finally adjourning. Our forming stage was painfully slow, it took us around 3 class sessions to get somewhat comfortable with each other, in fact to this point unfortunately I do not think I could rely in some of our members. Our storming process was inconclusive since we were not past some trust issues, I strongly believe that some of our team did not participated into the topic selection process and are somewhat uncomfortable with our team decision making. We continue by norming our basic team rules and parameter of research, we all did well in this part and to this date we have all deliver upon our goal. We are currently performing trying to effectively share our group outcome. We are pending the adjourning stages when we present our work.
We had few explicit roles upon our group, the rules that where clearly stated to us where our topic, how and where to conduct our research, punctuality as we discuss being in the team was the key to successfully accomplish our goal. Implicit roles in our team included basic behavioral rules, such as limiting use vulgarity, wait and listen to your time to speak, and most definitely respect, and empathy toward differences among our group. That was extremely important as our team was very diverse not just based upon nationality and ethnicity, but our thinking process, we had future teachers, medical practitioners, some majoring in communication and even engineering fields. I personally tried helping others and for the most part was supportive and i try helping team members with any type of concerns. I never use bad language and try to keep things in a professional level, not being so disclosing with personal information. Our interaction rules where rather positive, we did not got into any arguments and we were respectful with each other. It could been better by better interaction and coping since we were a bit separatist by nature.Our procedural norms where perhaps our weakest, we never set a way